Zola & Cézanne

After the whirlwind of activity last weekend in Nice and Monaco, I decided to take it easy this weekend. It's not a very hard thing to convince myself to do, especially when I know I'll be going to Spain in just a few days for my first vacation this term! I will be in Madrid from Saturday to Monday, at which point I'm off to Sevilla from Monday to Wednesday night. I'm doing this largely on my own, though I'll see my friend Alicia in Sevilla and I'm hoping to spend Saturday in Madrid with two girls from my program whose plans overlap with mine. I'm a bit apprehensive, but if everything goes off without a hitch--read: I come back with all my possessions and documents, I fudge my way through Spanish enough to not get in trouble, and I maybe get a little sun in the face--I will be happy.

As for this weekend, it was filled with two people, who were natives of Aix!: Emile Zola and Paul Cézanne. They grew up here and were best friends. Until Zola wrote a book called L'oeuvre that depicted a painter in an unfavorable light. Cézanne was not pleased.

I've been working on reading Zola's Germinal in the original French almost since I got to Aix, and I finally finished today! It was a challenge. Zola, like most of the grands écrivains in French, uses the passé simple a lot (simple past), a literary tense that replaces the past tense used in spoken and most modern written French. And then there is the usual difficulty with elevated vocabulary. The biggest temptation was to look up every word I didn't know in a dictionary, but I knew it would be better to just read for the plot and the characters. I'm so glad I got through it. And I hope to read it again so I can understand more of the nuances next time.

Germinal is about mining in France in the 19th century when political awareness and activism was rising in the working class. The miners go on strike under the leadership of a young miner who has educated himself on new socialist ideas, but it's only the very beginning of organized labor, and the miners are ill-prepared for a two and a half month strike. Zola describes in detail the horrible conditions in the mines and the corons, the slums that the Company has set up for the mining families. And once the strike is under way, the families are constantly battling starvation waiting for the bourgeois management to accept the workers' demands. I won't ruin the end for you, but there are two movies of it and the translation in English. I've heard good things about both of the movies; one is from the 60s and the other is from the 80s or 90s, I think.

I don't think there is a book quite like this about the US, probably because America didn't exactly have bourgeois and wasn't as influenced by socialist ideas. At least, that's what most would like to think, since socialism=communism (duh, right?), the most terrifying of all political systems ever. But also, la grève, the strike, is a central part of political expression and activism in France. It is a rite of passage. Unions are incredibly strong here. When several of them get together on one issue, they can literally stop daily life even for weeks, by setting up boycotts or blocking roads with tractor-trailors.

All the French know the songs, slogans, and chants of la grève, even if they pretend to make fun of themselves for this common obsession of the strike. It doesn't seem to matter what the object of the grève is, there will be a song to fit it and a crowd who will sing it. It's an entirely different viewpoint from the US, where strikes are seen as last resorts and often burdens on the rest of the community. My junior year of high school my teachers went on strike for a month, and there were many people who criticized the teachers for abandoning their jobs as educators. Even if certain people among the French don't agree with the reasons behind a strike, I have never heard anyone question an individual's morals or character for participating in one. It would be just as surprising as someone complaining about a smoker in a restaurant!

Now, as for Cézanne, I did something this weekend I've been wanting to do since I got here: I hiked Mont Saint Victoire. This is the mountain that Cézanne painted, I think, 28 times. Or something like that. I had seen several of these paintings at the Met in NYC and the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and now I kind of want to go back to see what I think, having seen it in person.

I went with three girls from my program, Allison, Sherie, and Jill. Four was a perfect number, very manageable. We took the short bus ride to the base of the mountain and started on a trail that was marked 'moyen', or mid-level in difficulty. It was a good day for hiking, not too warm, kind of brisk, and sunny most of the time. Eventually we came to a fork in the trail and we decided to take the more difficult path that would lead more directly to our target, the Croix de Provence, at the top of the mountain. Well, it certainly was difficult. I found myself thanking my friend Claudia for taking me once to the rock-climbing wall at Pitt. We were probably not wearing the right footwear for this kind of trail, but we made it, even after one rather dangerous detour from the path in search of pesky trailmarkers. And we got a huge payoff for our hard work of almost 4 hours climbing, not hiking (Allison was right to insist on the distinction in her blog, which again I'm referencing), to the Cross of Provence. The cross itself wasn't incredibly unique, but the views were amazing. Three-hundred-sixty degrees of rolling hills and mountains, a river, little towns peaking out from valleys. It was impressive, to say the least.

I still can't get over how different the geography (or topography? I'm losing my sense of the precision of certain words in English) is here, and the natural life. The mountain seemed to jut out of the land, not at all like the mountains I've seen before. The huge cliffs are streaked with this glowing orange that is the same color as the bright clay soil at the foot of the mountain. And the slopes (or dropoffs, really) are covered with beautiful conifers that are all over Cézanne's paintings, perfectly geometric bark and just the right amount of branches in the top third of the trunk. The brush is interesting too. Even though most leaves haven't come out yet, there's wild holly and these twiggy plants with muted purple-red branches that make the mountainside look like a patchwork of purples and greens and browns.

Needless to say, it was a great day. And tiring, after about 6 hours of hiking. This mountain is not for the faint-hearted or the out of shape. I count myself lucky to have only been slightly sore the next morning.

Pictures are to come!
A plus,
Maggie B.